Researchers at the University of Minnesota asked a few
hundred participants to rate emoji for sentiment from -5
(very negative) to +5 (very positive) and asked for
definitions, too. They looked at 22 different emoji on five
different platforms.

In the most extreme case — Microsoft's big grin emoji — there was
on average a 4.4-point difference in where any two
people rated it on the 10-point sentiment scale. Perhaps some
people thought it was an angry face.

Below you can see the emoji with the most and least
sentiment misconstrual.

If you think sentiment construal is hard, consider semantic
construal, where people are asked exactly what an emoji
means. Scores range from 0 (most) to (1) least in terms
of how similarly they were described.

Tied for most semantic misconstrual here is Apple's unamused
face, which people variously interpreted as disappointment,
depressing, unimpressed and suspicious. Here are the top and
bottom scores:

"We expected and hypothesized [misinterpretation] across
platforms, but the fact that we found significant within-platform
misconstrual was surprising," one of the authors, Hannah
Miller, told Tech Insider.